Why are all the box office mavens giving Angels & Demons a pass? The film opened two weekends ago and came in at No. 1, barely beating Star Trek’s second week. Last weekend, it slipped to four (now behind Star Trek) with more than a 60 a 54 percent drop.

Box Office Mojo says the budget was $150M, which, given some of the likely profit-participation deals of Tom Hanks and Imagine (the Ron Howard-Brian Grazer production shingle), could be low. Distribution and marketing costs worldwide could total $70M more.

If Sony takes 55 percent of the box office receipts, that would mean the film would have to make $400M worldwide to break even. Since it’s at $300M already, that seems likely, and with significant DVD sales to come, the movie is going to make some money.

All that said, Angels & Demons is the biggest under-performer of the year thus far. The model for sequels, remember, is to far outpace the original. (See The Matrix Reloaded, Shrek 2, Pirates 2, Bourne Supremacy, National Treasure 2, The Mummy Returns, etc. etc. etc.)

The fact is that Howard and Hanks damaged the brand. The Da Vinci Code was one of the worst-reviewed major movies of all time—a 46 percent positive score on Metacritic, an incredible 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” list. It was laughed off the screen at Cannes, and Variety called it “stodgy” and “grim.”

But no one asked Ron Howard or Tom Hanks about that on their chirpy PR campaigns last week. It was all ancient history.

Update: The film’s decline eased a little over the weekend, to 54 percent, still steep drop off. The weekend overviews, in the Times and in Variety, both noted the movie’s slip to fourth place without comment.

And in the end, what’s the highest it will gross domestically? $130M? Isn’t that a pathetic showing for an entry is one of the biggest franchises in the world? The new Night in the Museum will hit that sometime next week—and that film is yet another sequel that far outstripped its original at the box office.

I saw the thing yesterday and … it’s not bad, nowhere near as senselessly frenetic and ploddingly plotted. On the other hand, there remains evidence that no one involved was using their brains. One plot point, for example, is Hanks’ long-running desire to get into the Vatican archives. But it transpires in the film he’s able to read either Latin nor Italian.

And his character, of course, is a professor specializing in Vatican arcana. Harvard must have dropped its language requirements, another sign of the decline in American education. Little did the Vatican know that if it did let him in to the archives, he couldn’t have read anything anyway.